Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  Keeping my eyes on hers I said, ‘Put the knife back in your coat, Torian.’

  Did she have a weapon in her hand? I had no way of knowing. I certainly had one of my steel cards hidden inside the cuff of my sleeve and a castradazi coin I like to call the stinger palmed in my other hand.

  Her grin widened as she stepped back, showing no sign of the knife that I was now sure she’d been concealing.

  I realised then the awful truth about our relationship: Torian loved this – the threats, the danger, the fights. I would too, I guess, if I’d lived a different life. But a year ago I’d killed the first woman I’d ever made love to only days after a vicious bastard called the white binder had taken control of me and nearly made me …

  ‘Hey,’ Torian said quietly, unexpected concern in her gaze. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

  I couldn’t stand the pity in her eyes. ‘Go back to your bosses, Torian. Tell them I’m not interested in murdering some poor kid who’s probably no more a god than I am.’

  Torian’s voice carried an edge to it when she next spoke. ‘They’re not my bosses. I work for Queen Ginevra, same as you. I’m loyal to her, same as you.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve got your marshals keeping me from seeing her?’

  She groaned. ‘Of course it is, you idiot! I keep trying to make you understand that protecting Ginevra is my job!’

  ‘Then maybe you should be the one who goes and assassinates a foreign god for her.’

  She grabbed my arm a second time, proving that she wasn’t remotely troubled by the possibility of another physical altercation. ‘You think I didn’t offer? You think I didn’t beg the Murmurers to let me do what has to be done?’

  There was an anguished sincerity in her voice that gave me pause before I pulled away. ‘You’re the most famous marshal in all of Darome,’ I said at last. ‘The Berabesq would know you were working for the empire.’

  She nodded.

  ‘This is a job for an outlaw,’ I said.

  She nodded a second time.

  I turned away from her, not wanting her to see the tears forming at the corners of my eyes. I always cry after a fight, once the threat of life and death has come and gone. That lord magus in the saloon would’ve been enough to send me whimpering to my bed even on a good day. I hadn’t been ready to narrowly avoid getting myself executed by a shadowy group of generals and spies mere hours later. If I was being honest with myself though, neither of those events was what was making me tear up.

  ‘Does she know?’ I asked. ‘Does she agree with this … plan?’

  Torian did me the courtesy of not feigning ignorance. ‘She’s the queen, Kellen.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  The soft echo of Torian’s footsteps followed her down the hall as she said, ‘I think it is.’

  12

  The Messenger

  ‘What now?’ Reichis asked, scampering along beside me.

  Probably a bunch of weeping and moaning, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. Squirrel cats are not known for their appreciation for inconsolable melancholy.

  ‘A very long bath,’ I replied. ‘Followed by clearing out the royal stores of butter biscuits, followed by us finding out if the queen we agreed to serve is or isn’t the person we thought she was.’

  He climbed up my leg and back before settling himself on my shoulder. ‘You mean because she doesn’t want to wait for a horde of religious nuts to show up and cut her head off? What do you think she hired you for? To play cards with her once a week and drink tea?’

  Figures he’d take Torian’s side.

  The truth was, though, my life since entering the queen’s employ had been filled with far less conflict than my outlaw days. I mean, sure, there was that royal coup back when I’d first started, but since then – not counting the weeks of watching the co-conspirators being marched either to the gallows, to prison or, in some rare cases, to be pardoned – things had settled into an admirably dull routine.

  Once a week I played cards with Ginevra. Sometimes the game was just a game, other times she’d drop hints about political or military matters that concerned her and we’d play Argosi games, assigning people or issues to individual cards, laying them out in various ways and gleaning what we could from the patterns.

  When I wasn’t fulfilling my role as tutor of cards, I did a little spying here or there. Foreign diplomats often tried to bribe me to persuade the queen to agree to some request or other. I used these none-too-subtle conversations as ways to find out what I could about their true intentions. Sometimes, late at night, Reichis and I would pay them a little visit to see if we couldn’t convince them to reconsider their plans.

  The rest of the time? I kept an ear out for rumours of Ferius, always hoping she might pass through the Daroman territories and leave some disaster in her wake that would give me a clue as to her whereabouts. I missed her terribly.

  Missing people ain’t the Argosi way, she would’ve told me in that irritating frontier drawl of hers. Can’t walk your path if you’re always looking backwards.

  I could though. I looked back all the time. Saw that smirk of hers as she pulled out a smoking reed from inside her waistcoat. Her voice as she dispensed some new piece of lyrical Argosi wisdom that made no sense at the time but ended up saving my life in the end.

  Mostly, though, I missed the way she helped me see the world differently.

  What would you tell me to do now, Ferius? I swore to protect the queen. Easiest way to do that would be to go off and kill this so-called god-king the Berabesq have conjured up. Stop their people and their armies from uniting and setting off a war that will likely destroy half the continent. Isn’t that the Way of Thunder?

  In any given situation, the Argosi consider the four ways: be like water, flowing around conflict. Follow the wind, letting it guide you to where you need to be. Stand firm like stone, holding to what you know is true. Or strike like thunder, without hesitation, without remorse.

  Ferius was never big on thunder.

  I walked up to the pair of double doors that led to the baths in the tutors’ wing. Royal tutors are a big deal in Darome – especially when the monarch is only twelve years old. So each of our chambers had its own private bath, but Reichis preferred these ones, with their multitude of bathing opportunities and delicately arranged platters of biscuits.

  ‘Think you can bathe yourself or should I ask for a servant to come and scrub your back?’ I asked him.

  Generally speaking the squirrel cat hates humans; there aren’t many he allows to touch him without paying with a finger or possibly an eyeball. But he’s developed a perverse fondness for being pampered.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘What’s it going to be?’

  It was only then that I noticed the soft, rattling snore coming from where he lay slumped on my shoulder.

  ‘Reichis?’

  I picked him up to see what was going on. He opened his eyes a fraction, gave me a bleary, unseeing stare, then went back to sleep.

  Ah, crap.

  Reichis is a tough little bastard, but he’s vulnerable to Jan’Tep silk magic. Those mages who know about him will always open with a sleep spell to knock him out of the fight first. That’s why I hadn’t taken him with me to the saloon to deal with that lord magus. The guy knew way too much about us. The silver sigils on the frontier hat I wear protected me, but Reichis would’ve been unconscious the entire time. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed.

  Gently I set him down on the floor outside the doors to the baths. I flipped open the steel clips on the powder holsters at the sides of my belt and reached inside to take a pinch of the red and the black. ‘You may as well reveal yourself,’ I said. ‘It’s been hours since I killed anyone and people have given me plenty of reasons to want to.’

  No one replied. The baths are just a few doors down from my room, which meant in all likelihood someone was waiting for me there. My chambers have wards on them, just like those of most of the rooms insid
e the palace. Some spells can get through, but most forms of aggressive magic won’t work.

  I padded silently down the hall towards my room, the powders in my hands already starting to make my skin itch. ‘Last chance,’ I said. ‘Shalla, if this is you …’

  I saw the shimmering traces of an obscurement spell just outside my door begin to break apart. I recognised the signature.

  ‘Damn it, Shalla!’ I swore even before she began to appear. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t do this any more. Maybe he’s just a nekhek to you, but Reichis is my business partner, and you’ve got no right to …’

  I fell silent as the obscurement faded and Sha’maat of the House of Ke, Jan’Tep ambassador to the Daroman court, appeared before me. I often wondered how many hours my little sister spent in front of a mirror before any given encounter, carefully arranging her blonde tresses just so, spending ages picking the perfect gown, matching it to whatever locale she’d be standing in when she revealed herself, to the particular light at that time of day.

  She sat huddled against the door to my room, her simple black gown bunched awkwardly around her, golden hair strewn across her face. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew from the sobs that only now were becoming discernible as the last remnants of the obscurement crumbled.

  ‘Shalla?’

  She turned her face towards me, a mask of misery and despair so foreign to her features that I swear, for a moment, I wasn’t even sure if it was her.

  I crouched down beside her, searching for wounds or signs of some kind of assault, magical or otherwise. ‘Shalla, what’s wrong? What’s happened to you?’

  Her next words came out in a broken, wracking cry so wretched I had to wait until she repeated them before I could make sense of what she’d said.

  ‘Mother is dead.’

  13

  The Emissary

  The instant you realise you’ve walked into an ambush, your body does its level best to protect you. The muscles in your stomach clench in preparation for the first blow, your shoulders rise to protect your neck. The mind rids itself of all thought, all contemplation and conjecture, leaving behind only two choices: claw or cower. This is, by and large, a useful instinct, meant to keep you alive. The problem comes when you’re not actually being ambushed.

  Even if it feels like you are.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked, for what must’ve been the third time.

  Shalla was still sitting there, crouched against the door to my chambers. Even through her tears I could tell she was worried I’d lost my senses. ‘Bene’maat is gone. Our mother is gone.’

  I couldn’t seem to slow my breathing. My hands – usually steady in moments of danger from all the practice I’d had casting my powder spell in a fight – shook so badly it took me three tries to reach into my pocket and pull out the thirteen cards. ‘She can’t be dead! She gave me these just today! She—’

  Shalla tried to grab hold of my hand, but my reflexes were those of someone expecting to be attacked. As I yanked my arm away, the cards went flying, triggering whatever spell Bene’maat had placed on them. Even as the cards fell to the floor they began to slide into position, surrounding me in a circle.

  ‘She sent you those cards weeks ago,’ Shalla said. ‘Before the—’

  ‘Stop, please!’ I begged.

  My head was splitting open. Questions formed in my mind, over and over, each one coming so fast there wasn’t even time to ask the first before a new one appeared. I couldn’t even turn them into words; they were more like pictures … Symbols, flashing before me, each one representing a gap in my knowledge. A sudden itch in my left eye made me blink over and over, then a tightening around it as if someone were pinching the skin. I could tell the markings of my shadowblack were slowly spinning like the discs of a combination lock.

  ‘Brother, what’s happening to you?’ Shalla’s voice was distant, a muffled echo that rose and fell in pitch like wind screaming through a canyon.

  The enigmatism, some saner part of me realised as the circular markings around my left eye twisted and turned.

  A while back, I’d travelled to the Ebony Abbey in search of the means to rid myself of the shadowblack. There I’d met dozens of others with the disease, only it turned out there were many, many forms of the shadowblack, some of which could be wielded almost like magic. Mine was different, of course, because it wasn’t natural; my grandmother had banded me in shadow as a child. One side effect of my own markings was that I was an enigmatist – someone who could see into the secrets of others. Problem was, it only worked if I knew the exact right thing to ask, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

  Even in the chaos of questions flying through my mind, other voices tickled at the back of my skull. Memories. Echoes.

  The first was my mother’s: ‘Forgive the awkward fashion in which our conversation must take place, but I’ve been unable to properly recreate your sister’s wondrous spell for long-distance communication.’

  But why? Bene’maat was one of the most accomplished mages in our clan. Even if she couldn’t reproduce Shalla’s particular spell, why go to all the trouble of imbuing cards with messages instead of communicating some other way or coming to Darome herself?

  I imagined a click as I felt the first ring of my shadowblack markings unlock.

  Another memory, this time of Ke’heops in the Chamber of Murmurs … ‘The intelligence I bring cost my people a great deal to obtain. My … emissary was lost in the mission.’

  That momentary pause, the stumble of switching words at the last moment. My father never fumbled his words.

  Click.

  ‘Bene’maat was the emissary,’ I said aloud. ‘She was the one who brought word of the god from the Berabesq lands.’

  Shalla’s voice came to me as a distant whisper that muted the urgency of her words. ‘Brother, whatever you’re doing, stop! Your eye is turning black on the inside!’

  But there was one final piece, and again I heard my father speak as he had just hours ago inside the illusion of the desert he’d constructed for me.

  ‘The Faithful have a new weapon in their spiritual arsenal … It is a kind of … curse.’

  Click.

  The last of the circular markings around my left eye twisted, unlocking my enigmatism, sending me tumbling into the land of shadows.

  The hallways of the palace disappeared. The familiar sights, the sounds, the smells, all of them gone. Shalla was gone too. In their place a shadowblack realm, the sky above cut from ebony and the ground beneath me carved from onyx. All was black and yet I could see every detail of the landscape surrounding me with perfect clarity.

  I soon wished I couldn’t.

  Bene’maat gallops across the shadowy desert. Her horse is wounded, covered in slashes from the kaskhan and tiazkhan blades of the Faithful chasing her. The horse stumbles, falls. My mother runs, limping towards the border. Someone is there, helping her, but I can’t see them. Why? Why are they obscured from me?

  You haven’t asked the right question for that, a different voice tells me. It’s familiar even though I don’t recognise who it is.

  My vision shifts. The Berabesq Faithful stop their pursuit. A sandstorm whirls all around them, preventing them from continuing the chase. They gather in a circle and …

  One of them removes his linen garments, unwinding them in long strips until he is naked. He lies down on the ground in the circle of the others. The ones with the tiazkhan finger blades begin carving words onto his chest, his arms, his legs, his face. His moans of pain are muffled by the prayers chanted by his fellows. Blood seeps out of the words inscribed in his flesh, but still they continue to cut more and more of them as his body becomes a kind of scarlet scripture.

  Elsewhere my mother screams.

  ‘Neither walls nor spells can shield its victims,’ my father had said. ‘The sickness it brings is slow, agonising and completely incurable.’

  Time moves ahead – days or weeks or months, I can’t tell. The scene shifts
and I find myself in a place I recognise. A place I haven’t seen for more than two years and which makes me ache in ways I didn’t think was still possible. My home.

  Bene’maat is walking through the hall. She’s beautiful, as she’s always been, her grace conveying a kind of strength none of the rest of us possess. But something’s wrong. Something is stilted in the way she walks, as if she’s moving unnaturally slowly as she tries to force her steps to be smooth and precise. A vase on a nearby table falls and breaks. Her bare foot lands on a broken shard. She winces, and only then do a dozen other tiny, invisible wounds make themselves known to me.

  There’s a sprain in her wrist that came when she did nothing more than reach for a book on a high shelf; a small cut on her collarbone that appeared out of nowhere but is now infected and won’t heal no matter how many spells she casts; when she walked by a fire, the flames crackled and a burning ember singed the back of her hand.

  An endless stream of accidents, a rising tide of inexplicable misfortunes that tear at her will. She has trouble sparking her silk band now. Before that her iron band went dead. Piece by piece these tiny afflictions are destroying her.

  ‘Brother, please,’ I hear Shalla’s voice coming back. The markings around my eye are slowly closing again, but not before they curse me with one more vision.

  My mother stands before a mirror, putting ointment on the cut on her collarbone, but sees something beneath. She pulls open the top of her robe. There on her skin is a word, inscribed in the Berabesq language. The scar looks old, almost healed, yet it wasn’t there yesterday.

  The black sun outside rises and falls, rises and falls. Each time it brings me back to Bene’maat standing before the mirror, witnessing a new word inscribed in scars across the canvas of her body, each one paired with a new accident, some new misfortune that brings her inexorably closer to her end.

  The malediction, my father called it.

  I try to shut my eyes to avoid seeing my mother this way, but the last traces of the enigmatism reveal the entirety of the text to me. I speak only a little Berabesq, but I can read enough to know that the sinewy lines slowly carving themselves on my mother’s body are words of joy. A devotional. A prayer.